Word: gripes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Seldom have the press and public been so starkly at odds about journalism's role. While reporters and editors gripe about press restrictions, pool coverage and a lack of information about the war, many Americans have just the opposite complaint. Far from giving us too little information, they are saying, the press is trying to give us too much. Reporters seem too pushy in press briefings, too insensitive to the need for secrecy, too intent on looking for bad news. Why, goes the common cry, is the press trying to undermine the war effort? What are they first -- journalists...
...scripts. For one, audiences are growing older and may be interested, at least for now, in affecting, down-to-earth movies with characters who have more than one dimension. Big names are no longer a guarantee of a film's success, a development that prompts studio executives to gripe privately that certain stars are overdue for a deep discount, most notably Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Sean Connery, Bill Murray, Warren Beatty, Richard Dreyfuss and Nick Nolte. Each commands $3 million to $7 million a movie, but they are simply not attracting enough theatergoers to justify those salaries...
Richard Berendzen won't be getting his $1 million severance package from American University after all. But everything considered, he can hardly gripe. Berendzen resigned as president of the Washington institution last April after making repeated obscene telephone calls from his office to a woman in Virginia. Last week, following a campus-wide uproar over their largesse, the trustees struck a more modest deal: Berendzen will be retained as a tenured senior physics professor at a salary "appropriate to his faculty rank," somewhere around $70,000 a year, and will begin teaching in the spring...
Finally, while Americans may gripe about the foreign takeovers of Hollywood's dream machines, none of the buyouts have been hostile. Far from sneaking into Hollywood, both Sony and Matsushita were squired around by superagent Michael Ovitz, the homegrown power broker. All of which brings to mind a scene in the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait in which the fictional owner of the Los Angeles Rams decries the abrupt takeover of the team by a fancy-pants financier. "The s.o.b. got my team," he moans. But how did the sneaky businessman do it? Says the team owner: "I asked...
...everything from mandarin oranges and pickled garlic to sunflower oil. Prices, though, are staggering. The average annual income of Soviets is only 250 rubles, and so few can afford the luxury of tomatoes at 10 rubles for about two pounds, or beef at 30 rubles a cut. Peasants gripe that free markets in Moscow are under the control of black- marketeering middlemen from the Caucasian republics who are deliberately limiting supplies to keep prices high. Managers of state-run shops also hold back scarce goods from open sale and make a hefty profit by selling them out the back door...